Williams admits it has work to do

Monaco GP winner Juan Pablo Montoya and Ralf Schumacher, who has won this race in the past, finished the session in 12th and 15th positions respectively. Montoya outbraked himself and lost time, while Schumacher chose a shallow wet tyre, rather than the extreme wet that most ran with.

"I had poor grip and the handling of the car was very difficult," said Montoya. "We can work on this and improve our car for tomorrow, when track conditions could possibly be very different. Anyway, this is what we've got at the moment."

Schumacher said: "I was quite unlucky on my fast lap, as just before I went out onto the track it started to rain even harder. In free practice, when it started raining hard, I was actually one of the quickest. This means that we should be capable of being competitive in such weather conditions, even if this wasn't evident in today's qualifying."

The team's chief operations engineer Sam Michael admitted: "These could be the conditions we are going to have for the weekend, and we've got a bit of work to do on the set-up for tomorrow."